The Cutthroat Cannibals (22 page)

“I’m scared, Stone. I just don’t feel brave at all. I don’t want to die. I don’t want any of us to die.”

“Any man or woman who said that they weren’t scared shit right now, they’d be a liar,” Stone replied with a soft whisper.
“I’m scared too.” He looked at her and tried to smile, to show her that at least one person on this fucked-up piece of rock
called earth was not a murdering cannibal. And she seemed to feel something, for she brightened and returned the smile, her
eyes glowing like little stars.

“Tell me, Mr. Stone,” she went on, glancing around to make sure they weren’t being overheard or observed, “do you—do you believe
in God? In an afterlife? Do you think we will go anywhere when we die, or just into those grotesque stomachs?” She seemed
nervous as she spoke, her long red hair flowing about her neck and head like a cape of fiery wheat. But once the questions
were out, a look of relief settled over her face as if it had been important just to ask them, to release the thoughts that
had been preying on her mind like a lion on a carcass for the last thirty-six hours since they had been captured.

“I think yes, we will go somewhere beyond just the digestive tracts of the albinos,” Stone said, looking her hard in the face.
“I mean we already were nothing, came from nowhere, before we entered these bodies, didn’t we? We once didn’t exist already.
Out of nothing, into something, back to nothing again. As far as I can see we’ll re-emerge again in some other form, human
or not, I don’t know. It’s not something I can prove, just a feeling but a strong one. Sometimes when I’m very tired, or relaxed—or
drunk—and lying down somewhere so that there isn’t a bit of tension in my body…” Stone stopped as he suddenly felt for an
instant how incredibly tight all his muscles were right now, as if he had been wound up tight as a steel coil and was ready
to explode.

“Anyway,” Stone went on, “when I
do
feel relaxed, I swear I can feel that I was something before I was this. There are dim memories in the back of my mind, images
that are almost but not quite there. Do you know what I mean? It’s as if there’s a curtain over the past before this life.
It’s something we’re not supposed to see or understand. But that doesn’t mean it’s not true.” Stone stopped suddenly, feeling
a little embarrassed that he had delivered such a monologue. He hadn’t even quite realized that he had had such feelings,
beliefs, before. But imminent death stirs up deep waters.

“Thank you,” Charise said after nearly a minute of silence as she continued to look deeply into his eyes like a faith-starved
saint staring madly up into the pillowed clouds of heaven searching for God. “Thank you for sharing that feeling with me.
It means more than you can know. To feel that there
is
something more, something beyond. I have dimly felt such things too, but couldn’t put the words to them like you did. I don’t
feel as afraid of dying now,” she said, with a determined look on her beautiful young face.

Stone couldn’t help but glance over suddenly at her right breast, which hung out exposed from the shirt that had been torn
somewhere along the line during her capture. The breast was as perfect a specimen as Stone had ever seen. Like an exquisite
golden fruit rising out as if to catch the rays of the sun, rising to be warmed and plucked. He tore his eyes away, suddenly
realizing he had been sort of spacing out right on the pink nipple, and coughed as he looked away. Torture turned to desire.
Fear to lust. Man was a strange creature.

The milky rays of the moon bathed her long golden-red tresses. Silky flesh raised on milk and butter and honey, upturned erect
nipples, smooth turn of thigh and arm, slightly flushed rosy-cheeked face. Stone felt his groin swell and throb with a sudden
urgent, insane desire.

She began crying again and Stone turned to her, wishing more than anything that he could hold her, comfort her, kiss her.

“Don’t cry, sweet Charise.” But he couldn’t really offer a reason not to cry. Even if one
did
believe that there was an afterlife, leaving this one in the teeth of those albino slugs was enough to make even the toughest
of the tough sick to his stomach.

“Stone—they plan to use me tomorrow.” She winced in pain at the very thought. “Earlier today, before you came, they were touching
me all over and laughing about how they’d construct a pulley system to lower me on top of them since they were too fat and
didn’t have the strength to do it their filthy selves.”

“Jesus,” Stone muttered with a sharp intake of breath. Somehow his whole little rap seemed like so much bullshit in the face
of her words. Being raped by those two might be worse than being eaten by them. She looked at him hard now with the burning
fire of the half-possessed in her blue-green eyes. Her expression was strange, fearful, and curious.

“There’s something else. I—I—am a virgin. They will—I don’t want it to be this way. I may be dead within twenty-four hours—but
first they’ll rape me, both of them, perhaps even their filthy servants.” She looked down at the cold, hard earth, hardly
able to continue. But her own rising desires were stronger than her natural female shyness. She raised her head again. This
time her eyes were bold, flaming like novas. “I want
you
to take me first. A decent man to be the first one into me, to make love to me.”

“I—I—” Stone stuttered over and over, tongue-tied like a buck-toothed thirteen-year-old on his first date. “It’s not that
I wouldn’t be honored, don’t get me wrong,” Stone said, looking around to see what the cavemen were up to, but every one of
them was out cold. Not a figure was stirring. “But we’re not exactly in the best situation to—” He looked over at her brother,
who was hanging there still unconscious, and her father out in the land of Nod, perhaps never to come out of it. A fun bunch
to hang out with.

“I have my own ways,” she said. “Watch!” She squirmed suddenly at her bonds, pulling her whole body this way and that, wriggling
her extremities like a belly dancer, so that she was able to stretch her lower torso all the way around—and their bodies were
hip to hip, though their heads were still about two feet apart. He felt the ice-hard erection swelling under his zipper as
she lifted her foot and undid the pants, then the zipper. He looked at her in amazement.

“We used to have contests in high school to see who could perform various tasks with their feet so we could see what it was
like to be handicapped to have no arms or hands. I was the best.” Stone could see that she was, and just what a useful talent
it was. She opened his zipper with her right foot, pulling with her toes, and the engorged member burst forth.

“They never thought of this,” Charise said with a sly smile, massaging the tool with her foot, running her sole up and down
the shaft, curling her toes around the organ so that Stone instantly started going half mad.

It was really quite amazing what a shot of male hormone in the bloodstream would do for one’s energy level. For though Stone
had felt he was ready for the morgue just minutes before, now, with her half-naked lushness, the triangle of hair between
her legs exposed like a golden fleece, he suddenly felt as if he was ready to go fifteen rounds with Muhammad Ali. Though
a few minutes with the woman who was pressing hard against him would be far preferable.

“Do it,” she said frantically. “Please, Stone, help me somehow, to get it in.” She sounded half mad, with the look of the
fanatic in her eyes, to lose her virginity, and fast. She gripped one leg around his waist and pushed up hard with the other.
She pressed the moist lips of the furry triangle forward until it met the swollen head of Stone’s manhood. She was wet, very
wet, and giving off a scent that made him feel intoxicated, the scent of fruits and flower petals and musk and the inside
of a woman’s creamy thighs. She pushed her hips forward, trying to find him, spasmodically reaching for him with her center,
again and again. Tomorrow she would be dead. She would give her all, her love, her body to this man, at this moment. There
would be nothing else.

“Please, do it, get it in,” she pleaded, her eyes rolling back, her whole body starting to tremble. Stone guided the probing
staff in by moving his hips. Suddenly the very tip of it reached her and slid in between the parting flesh lips.

“It’s hard, it hurts,” she groaned, a single tear falling down each of her flushed cheeks. He pushed suddenly with all his
strength to penetrate her, get it over with fast. She gasped and rolled her eyes heavenward as the organ moved suddenly, cleanly
into her. She froze, motionless for a second, trying to get used to the newness of it. Then she began moving, slowly at first,
up and down on the long shaft, then with increasing vigor and jerking motions, holding on to his hips with her right leg wrapped
tight around his hips and back. He slid in and out of her in deeper and stronger strokes, filling her whole center, her stomach.
She moved against him like deep velvet being cut by a knife, like a girl/woman who had realized her dreams at last, even in
the very midst of death.

“Stone, Stone,” she mewed, like a deer calling in the soft grass. “It’s so good… it’s…”

“Don’t talk,” he said, “they’ll hear us. But I know, I feel it too. Your body is—is paradise.” Then they were both reaching
that peak called orgasm, a series of quivers the first signs from her; the relentless buildup of a bull-like load, of a Hoover
Dam about to burst, sent shudders through his tortured body. Then they came, simultaneously gasping out, heaving in jerks
of complete ecstasy.

At last their tremors both subsided and he slipped out from her as she choked down a scream of loss. “I love you. Can I say
that, Martin Stone? I know it’s insane, completely mad. But can I say it just for this night?” He stared back at the beautiful
creature beside him.

“Always,” Stone said as softly as he had ever spoken in his life. “Say it always.”

“Tomorrow when they come, they’ll find a woman. A woman who has already known a man. They can do what they want with me now—because
I don’t care. They can take me but not dirty me.”

He looked at her with tears in his own eyes now. Because
he
did care. Suddenly he cared terribly what was going to happen to her. He couldn’t let her die, which meant that he had to
save himself, save them both, no matter the impossible odds. Stone had touched her perfect beauty and he wasn’t about to let
it die.

T
HE only thing worse perhaps than knowing he was going to be eaten in a few hours was the fact that Stone had to listen to
the two albino brothers arguing with one another all fucking day long. From the moment they emerged from their human-walled
tent on the hill that morning they were snapping at each other from their respective wheelbarrows. Arguing about which plates
they were going to use tonight, about how to roast the meat, about whether to have some of them as appetizers or all as the
main course. In a world of narrow parameters the brothers found plenty to fight tooth and nail over.

They spent the afternoon preparing their sauces and spices that they were going to use on the four prisoners. But though the
sauces got made the arguments and snipping at each other only grew fiercer as the day wore on. One of the subhumans made the
unfortunate mistake of spilling a whole vat of some precious flavoring or other right into the coals. After they whipped him
to shreds they had his head bashed in and then threw him to the other cavemen to eat. The subhumans tore into the bloody burger
oblivious as to whether they were eating their own kind or not. All meats digest the same as they pass through the stomach.

Stone went half crazy when the two wheel-barrowed loads of sludge had themselves pushed over to their four prisoners. They
had their underlings strip them all completely naked. Stone strained at the cords that held him securely to the pole, wishing
he could cover Charise’s nakedness from the slime bastards. For the moment however all they wanted was to baste the four.
Two vats were brought up and their neanderthal servants, the more intelligent of the lot, were set to work slopping the foul-smelling
“sauces” all up and down them, covering every inch of their bodies. Stone felt humiliated, infuriated to the point of exploding.
It was worse than being whipped, beaten even. Denying him even the dignity of being a man, turning him into nothing more than
a meal, a Sunday pig, a goose, a hanging duck in a Chinese deli.

“You bastards, you fucking slime bastards,” Stone screamed over and over uselessly as he lunged out, trying to kick at the
two.

“Ah good,” one of them laughed out so that every part of him shook and shimmied like some diseased jelly. “That’s excellent,
yell, kick, do it all, it increases oxygen in the blood, makes the meat tastier, much tastier.” This of course only made Stone
even more furious so that he turned red and leaped straight up in the air, throwing out a side kick at a ninety-degree angle.

But of course they had positioned themselves out of range of their prisoners. In the past their captured “dinners” had often
lashed out when tied up—the albino brothers had the scars and missing teeth to show for it. Not that much of anything was
distinguishable within the folding drips of fat that were their formless faces. Just fat white lips that moved and argued
and directed their slaves to “be more fucking careful with the bat guano, you fools.” All in all it was just about the worst
afternoon Stone had ever spent.

They were to be eaten when the sun went down. Or at least the meal would begin. For the four of them were to be spread out
between sundown and midnight. The brothers debated every detail of the banquet, either not caring that their “meals” heard
every word of their fates, or more likely enjoying the sadistic mental torture as well to the hilt. Stone was a mental wreck
trying to figure some way out of all this. He couldn’t allow it to happen, not just his own death alone, but all of them eaten
by these slime. It just couldn’t be. And yet try as he might, searching every brain cell that still functioned, he couldn’t
find a single fucking route of escape.